Pledged (19 page)

Sorority Gigolo

NOVEMBER 20: FLOAT DECORATING

VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

too sick to care

VICKI DIDN’T MUCH CARE WHO WON GREEK WEEK, BUT SHE
skipped
her Wednesday classes to help the Beta Pis with the Float Decorating competition. The teams had a trailer and twelve hours to construct a float representing their theme. By noon, four hours into the competition, few of the teams had started; many of the Greeks were still in class or in bed. Vicki could see, however, that next door the Alpha Rhos had already erected on their trailer massive pyramids which some sisters were painting gold. An hour later, Sorority Row, packed with Greeks in their Greek Week tees and bandannas, echoed with the sounds of hammering, sawing, shrieking, and accompaniments blasting from various stereos. Vicki walked around the Row surveying the floats.

Two Beta Pi sisters in front of Vicki’s house looked confused as they perused an instruction manual. “Umm, it says here we need a screwdriver?” pondered one. It would be a while before they built trees for their koalas. Vicki moved on. The England team worked diligently on a castle façade, Brazil constructed a rain forest, and Spain designed a bullfighting ring. The sorority and fraternity representing Holland were attempting to attach a line of pinwheels to a tall pole on their trailer. After an hour of work on precarious ladders to get the string fastened properly, a gust of wind blew the pinwheels to the ground.

“Ohhh myyy Gawwwd,” a Holland sister groaned in an accent shared by most of her sisters.

“There goes that idea,” said a fraternity brother on the ground. From the top of a ladder another brother muttered, “I quit.”

Vicki passed the Iota house but she didn’t go in to greet William. As much as Vicki liked him, she wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend. She saw him every few days—usually to smoke marijuana in his room—and had taken him to the Beta Pi Date Party. But to make sure she didn’t invest too much in him, she was also regularly spending time with Dan, the bronzed Theta Theta brother from Los Angeles. Vicki’s closest sisters in Beta Pi were thrilled. They thought Dan was a nicer person than William, who had a reputation among the Greeks as a sorority gigolo—someone who cavorted with girls in several different sororities at once.

That afternoon, Vicki fell ill. She could do nothing all day but sleep and whisper on the phone to her friends in California. She had been sleeping for twelve hours straight when blond frizz poked through her bed curtain as Olivia slid her a tray with water, orange juice, and toast.

“Hi, I brought food. You have to eat,” Olivia said. “And I brought a visitor!” Olivia pushed aside the curtain as Vicki blew her bangs out of her eyes to see Dan holding a bouquet of roses. Vicki brightened.

Later that night, when William stopped by with a care package, Vicki felt like royalty. But William had more on his mind than the chicken soup he offered her. “So just be my girlfriend already,” he said, half smiling.

Vicki laughed, which led to banter that she later realized was half serious.

“Please, just be my girlfriend!” William begged, tickling her cheek with his goatee.

“No!”

“I’m going to call you that anyway.”

“No!”

“Come home with me for Thanksgiving, then.”

“No!”

Vicki didn’t want her relationship with William to escalate into something serious, but her conscience was bothering her because neither he nor Dan knew about the other. The prospect of having a boyfriend again so soon scared Vicki. She now knew, however, that William wasn’t interested in dating anyone else.

The next morning she called Dan and told him she couldn’t see him so often anymore. “Um, I’ve started talking to my ex-boyfriend again, the one I broke up with in September?” she lied. “So you and I should probably take it easy for a while.” Again, Vicki was struck by how graciously Dan handled her brush-off.

Two Faces of Talent

NOVEMBER 21: LIP SYNC

CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

Gyrating for the masses

THE GYM, SMELLING OF STALE COLOGNE AND FEET, WAS
packed for
Lip Sync. The Greeks were slightly more controlled now than during Greek Olympics, if only because they were assigned to certain sections of the bleachers (on which, inevitably, hung banners proclaiming their team’s ultimate superiority). But again there were the chants, the poster waving, the spirit gauging, the yells and jeers ricocheting across the gym. Again the furtive meeting of warring colors—a brother in yellow, a pink-ribboned girl—that rendezvoused in the middle of the room for a quick kiss.

Most of the Greeks wore their T-shirts, except for the talent show participants, who were decked out in elaborate costumes sewn specifically for Lip Sync, including open kimonos revealing black lingerie; short, tight Dutch-girl dresses with platformed clogs; or practically nothing (that was Brazil). The Delt dancers were face-painted like King Tut, while the Alpha Rhos wore billowing pants, matching bikini tops, and veils below their eyes. The Beta Pis wore short, sexy skirts with kangaroo tails and the Kappa Tau Chis sported croc-hunter safari suits. Most of the girls wore an abundance of makeup, as if they expected theater lights. The gym resembled an R-rated version of “It’s a Small World.”

The twenty-one judges, again in khaki, chatting and waving at their friends, sat in folding chairs at a long wooden table in front of the stage, where they had the best view of the enormous constructed sets the teams had built. Some groups had consulted professional choreographers. Beta Pi had brought dry ice.

During each long stretch between dances, as students gave up trying to discern the emcee’s unintelligible blather, the teams erupted into barely controlled pandemonium. Girls loudly sang along when a Britney Spears song came on the unsophisticated sound system. Brothers in the back of the gym played keep-away with another guy’s skullcap. In the middle of the gym, a fat guy fell down. Although amid the chaos most of the Greeks didn’t seem to notice, he nonetheless got back up again and immediately dove onto the hardwood floor, trying to make it look as if the first one had been on purpose, too. The teams did waves and practiced their dance moves, but mostly they screamed their dueling chants at each other from across the room, which caromed Greek-letter echoes off the walls.

Chris, his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, stood alone in the back of the gym, watching Caitlin interact in the bleachers, remove the T-shirt she wore over her bikini top, and then make her way to the stage with Amy and Sabrina. When Caitlin danced, her muscles rippling, Chris high-fived a neighbor. The routine went smoothly, to cheers from the audience and smiles from the judges. Caitlin met up with Chris and wrapped her arms around him. After a kiss, she playfully shoved him and he shoved back. They sat together on the floor in front of the Alpha Rho–Delta Lambda bleachers to watch the Beta Pis complete a similarly impressive dance routine.

. . .

LATER THAT NIGHT, THE BLACK GREEKS, WHO, AS on many campuses
across the country, did not participate in Greek Week, staged their own competition on the other side of campus: the university’s annual “step show.” At least two thousand spectators—not merely Greeks, as had been the case at Lip Sync—jammed the darkened auditorium and head-bobbed to the hip-hop music blasting from a high-end sound system as they waited for the show to begin. Neon spotlights danced across the faces in the crowd, illuminating a tiny smattering of whites among the black and Hispanic faces. The judges sat in semiformal clothes at an elegant table directly in front of the stage. There was an aura of respect about the crowd. Soon it wasn’t difficult to understand why.

The step show was like a mix of dance and sport and something tribal, like Broadway’s
Stomp
with fewer props and more emotional expression. Some of the acts were breathtaking. After the usual stomp-clap-and-chant opening, the sororities incorporated more perilous dance moves, tossing props by their heads. Their sounds were perfectly synchronized. Between acts, the sororities and fraternities in the audience “called” at each other. One fraternity made barking sounds. A sorority stood while sisters formed signs with their hands. A dozen or so fraternity brothers stood in a line and danced.

The crowd was already on their feet and applauding when the girls in the third step act, in time with the music, suddenly blindfolded themselves. The crowd gasped as the girls leapt over each other in stilettos, continuing to step as they sat on each other’s laps and wove across the stage, unseeing. This was step at its finest and the crowd knew it. “No one can perform as good as this,” an older woman in the audience whispered to another, who nodded emphatically.

The Meaning of Step Shows

STEPPING ORIGINATED IN THE MID-1900S AMONG BLACK
sororities and fraternities as a way to express group identity and Greek loyalty. It is defined, according to dance historian Jacqui Malone, as “a complex multilayered dance genre [that] features synchronized, precise, sharp, and complex rhythmical body movements combined with singing, chanting, and verbal play. It requires creativity, wit, and a great deal of physical skill and coordination. The emphasis is always on style and originality, and the goal of each team is to command the audience with stylistic elements derived primarily from African-based performance traditions.”

But neither that description nor mine can truly do the art form justice. Step is a performance of synchronicity and harmony that serves as a more striking display of group unity than perhaps any other Greek activity, black or white. It is marching, cheerleading, call-and-response, rap, tap dancing, martial arts, percussion, gymnastics, military drilling, singing, stomping, stamping, and slapping in one. When I attended the State U step show, I was awed by both the spirit and the talent—and that was before I learned about the meaning behind the sisters’—or, as black sororities refer to them, “sorors’”—intricate footwork.

Each of the four historically black national sororities has “signature” or “trade” steps that audiences are sophisticated enough to recognize, such as Alpha Kappa Alpha’s “It’s a Serious Matter” and Zeta Phi Beta’s “Sweat.” To distinguish the groups further, each sorority has a “sign,” or hand signal, and a “call”—a verbal acknowledgment to indicate membership, whether during a step show or while walking across campus—often used to start and end steps (the audience also calls, to encourage the performers). Alpha Kappa Alpha’s call is “skee-wee,” Delta Sigma Theta’s is “ooo-oop,” Sigma Gamma Rho’s is “ee-yip,” and Zeta Phi Beta’s is “ee-i-kee.” (Black sororities also have a “stroll” or “partywalk,” which is a choreographed series of dance steps that they perform in shows or fall into at casual parties.) During a step performance, a sorority will frequently include “salutes” or tributes to another sorority, or “cracks”—comical insults—by mimicking the other group’s trade steps. Another type of step, called a “retrospect,” tells the history of the sorority or the culture through dance.

Essentially, step shows are to black Greeks what Greek Week is to whites in terms of the immense amount of preparation and anticipation, the display of sorority spirit, and the crowning of a champion. But step is more than that: it is a form of solidarity and identity pride that lasts far beyond a performance. As one sister has explained, “The greatest feeling in the world is to meet a Soror that you’ve never met before from across the country, then you start singing, chanting, stepping, and partying together.”

Connecting

NOVEMBER 22

SABRINA’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

Best night ever.

AFTER SABRINA FINISHED HER AFTERNOON SHIFT AT THE
restaurant,
Professor Stone picked her up in his Saab to take her to an out-of-the-way Starbucks rather than the one on campus. Sabrina, her heart pounding wildly, tried hard not to look at him. Good things, she thought to herself. He wants to talk about good things.

“I have a question for you,” he said.

Sabrina, who hadn’t had time to change out of her waitress uniform, daintily smoothed her green skirt and looked at him.

“What do you want in life?”

Sabrina pondered this. “Well, I would like a home and a job, to start with.” She talked about wanting to escape poverty.

Professor Stone shook his head. “No, that’s not quite what I meant.”

Sabrina tried not to blush.

“I meant, what is it you want out of the relationships in your life?”

Wondering what the question implied, Sabrina thought her answer over carefully. “Well, I would like someone who is intelligent—that’s really important.”

“What else?” he urged.

“I guess I would like someone taller than me, even though that sounds silly.” Professor Stone towered over her.

“What else?”

“Someone with ambition.”

They parked at Starbucks, ordered coffee, and grabbed a table.

“And what else?” he urged again.

“All right,” Sabrina exhaled. “I want someone who I can be myself with. I want to be able to be silly or mean or whatever I’m feeling at the moment and I wouldn’t have to explain it and it wouldn’t jeopardize the relationship. And I want someone who could support himself financially so I wouldn’t have to do it for him.”

Professor Stone nodded understandingly. He told her about how he was broke when he was in college, and that there were certain things a person had to be able to provide for himself. Sabrina grew bolder.

“So what else do
you
want?” she asked.

Professor Stone talked about other things he desired eventually out of life and out of his career.

“Yes, but,” Sabrina swallowed, “what do you want in a relationship?”

Professor Stone looked into her eyes. “I want someone who is a good conversationalist,” he began, and went on from there.

“Some friends of mine were at my place this weekend,” he said, “and they noticed your photographs on my desk. They asked me what they were, so I showed them.” Sabrina’s mind whirled. She had left about a dozen photos for him. He had taken them home?